The enactments, of course, were still there on the city Statute-book; and, if an example needed to be made of any specially obnoxious tradesman, they might sometimes be enforced in all their theoretical rigour. In general, however, the severity of the written law was scarcely realized but by men with very tender consciences or with very few friends. Forestalling in the market was one of the most heinous of civic offences; yet, while John Doe was dutifully paying his morning orisons, Richard Roe was "out at cockcrow to buy privately when the citizens were at Mass, so that by six o'clock, there was nothing left in the market for the good folk of the town."[141] Not less heinous was the selling of putrid victuals. Here we do indeed find the theoretical horrors of the pillory inflicted in all their rigour, but not once a year among the 40,000 people of London.[142] These cannot have been the only offenders, or even an appreciable fraction of them; for Chaucer's sarcasm as to the unwholesome fare provided at cook-shops is borne out even more emphatically by others. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry tells how a customer once pleaded for a reduction in price "because I have bought no flesh but at your shop for these last seven years." "What!" replied the Cook, "for so long a time, and you are yet alive!" The author of "Piers Plowman" exhorts mayors to apply the pillory more strictly to--
"Brewsters and bakers, butchers and cooks; For these are men on this mould that most harm worken To the poor people that piece-meal buyen: For they poison the people privily and oft ..."
A lurid commentary on these lines may be found in a presentment of the twelve jurors at the Norwich leet-court. "All the men of Sprowston sell sausages and puddings and knowingly buy measly pigs; and they sell in Norwich market the aforesaid sausages and pigs, unfit for human bodies."[143]
This, of course, is only one side of city life: the side of which we catch glimpses nowadays when the veil is lifted at Chicago. Rudimentary and partial as city justice still was in Chaucer's days, overstrained in theory and weak-kneed in practice, it was yet a part of real self-government and of real apprenticeship to higher things in politics, not only civic but national. The constitution of the city was frankly oligarchical, yet the mere fact that the citizens should have a constitution of their own, which they often had to defend against encroachments by brotherly co-operation, by heavy sacrifices of money, or even at the risk of bloodshed--this in itself was the thin end of the democratic wedge in national politics. Rich merchants might, indeed, domineer over their fellow-citizens by naked tyranny and sheer weight of money, which (as 14th-century writers assert in even less qualified terms than those of our own day) controls all things under the sun. But it was these same men who, side by side with their brothers, the country squires,[144] successfully asserted in Parliament the power of the purse, and the right of asking even the King how he meant to spend the nation's money, before they voted it for his use.